The coronavirus pandemic has crippled the entire world for more than a year now, and left the entire scientific community grappling to fight it. But resilience and determination to fight off problems is what makes the human race special. Let’s start with a story from 500 years ago, and see where this all fits in with the coronavirus crisis.
500 years ago, the Chinese observed something magical- people who had got the deadly disease of smallpox once never got infected with it for the rest of their lives! So, they started preserving the ‘scabs’ (dried up skin) from people who got a mild case of smallpox, drying them further to crush them to a powder and blowing them up the nostril of healthy people. Curiously, in order to balance the “science” of it, they gave it in the right nostril to the boys and in the left to the girls. This, they believed, would transfer the ability to fight off the smallpox disease to the uninfected person. Today, we call this ability of a living body to ward off foreign objects (such as bacteria and virus), as immunity.
3 centuries later and 8,000 kilometers away from India, in a cattle farm, Edward Jenner, a British physician, observed something similar. The milkmaids who got a mild disease called cowpox, did not get smallpox infection ever in their lives. With this idea, he developed the first “safe and reliable smallpox vaccine” using cowpox virus. The vaccine contained a very small dose of living vaccinia virus that allowed the human body in which it was injected, to build its immunity against the smallpox virus. This small observation led to such a radical change in medical science that the world has not seen a single case of smallpox since 1977.
Like any other country, the positive impact of vaccines on India has been huge as well. Being a tropical country, many parts of India have a hot and humid climate, and many diseases are able to thrive in this kind of environment. One such crippling disease was polio that could kill or paralyze the person who got infected. India battled with it for many years. But, notice how I am able to talk about it in the past tense! Thanks to an extensive vaccination (immunization) drive, India has now completely eradicated polio a decade ago.
But, be absolutely clear that vaccines are not medicines that can cure a disease. Vaccines prepare and protect. Imagine being vaccinated to being like having intelligence information about your opponent to defeat them. If you were playing rock-paper-scissors with your friend and you know beforehand what your friend is going to do, you could always be ready with the counterattack. Vaccination provides that information to your body against a dangerous microbe that may attack you in the future. So, your body is always prepared to fight it off and you do not get the disease.
However, preparing a vaccine takes time. It took scientists more than 20 years to develop the Polio vaccine. Fortunately, with the rapid progress in the field of molecular biology and ease of sequencing DNA, we can now develop the vaccines much faster. That takes me back to the start of this story – vaccines for the new coronavirus. Today, scientists across the world have been able to develop the vaccine to fight off the coronavirus within a year of its first case. And it’s not just one vaccine; there are many of them such as Moderna (from UK), Pfizer (from USA) and Covishield and Covaxin from India. In fact, today India is helping other countries to fight off coronavirus by giving them the vaccines that our scientists have developed in India.
But developing vaccines faster is only half the battle won. Today, scientists are shifting their focus to making the vaccines more effective and risk-free. The main challenge is not to develop the science but to translate that knowledge into low-cost solutions that would make it available to everybody in this world. We would truly win this challenge on the day when people would not have to think twice before getting their seasonal vaccines, just like they don’t have to with the seasonal fruits!
